She caught me looking at it. “Millikin in the fall.” She rolled her eyes. “Free tuition because of my mom. But at least I get to live on campus.”
I nodded, knowing that had been the plan for years. I’d been considering going with her. The school had fit my dad’s requirement of being close enough for me to drive home to check on my mom on a regular basis; hence, the car I was supposed to get as a graduation gift. Only, that car had been traded in for a minivan with a car seat for my new half sister, as I’d discovered last month.
I forced away thoughts of my evil stepmother—and her potentially evil spawn—to focus on the task at hand. “This is where you sense her presence most often?” I asked, trying not to squirm at the supreme cheesiness of that line.
But Misty apparently saw nothing amiss in it. She nodded, rubbing her hands over her arms as though chilled.
I didn’t feel anything out of the ordinary besides amped up air-conditioning, which I knew was Misty’s standard protocol whenever her mother was out of the house. Dr. E. was very environmentally conscious and probably wouldn’t have installed A/C at all if she could have handled the whining from the other members of her family.
I didn’t see any obvious blurry spots, but seeing ghosts still wasn’t something I was particularly skilled at. So I focused on listening instead, trying to screen out the noise of the television for the sound of whispers or movement nearby, but all that garnered me was Leanne downstairs, apparently yapping away on the phone.
“No, seriously, she just showed up here. Can you believe it?” She gave a bark of laughter. “I should invite her to Ben’s party tonight. Now, that would be worth seeing, I bet. Freak-out of the Century, part two, you know?”
Wonderful. News of my arrival and recently acquired weirdo status would reach the entire graduating class before I could even leave here. Fortunately, most of them would be going to college in the next week or so, and I wouldn’t have to deal with them much after that.
Though, of course, there was no way I’d be stuck in this body for that long. Right?
Riiight.
“Anything?” Misty asked anxiously, looking around the room as well.
I shook my head with a grimace. I really wanted to catch this jerk who was pretending to be me. “She was here this morning? Are you sure?”
Misty nodded rapidly, then hesitated before adding, “Well, I’m pretty sure. Nothing was knocked over or anything. It was just that feeling again.” She shivered.
Great. Maybe Will had been right, and this was all in Misty’s head. “Anywhere else we can check?”
She thought about it for a second and then gestured to the half-closed door to the attached bathroom. “That’s where the message showed up on the mirror.”
Might as well check it out while I was here. God, it was going to suck if I had to leave without anything. Will, assuming he ever spoke to me again, would never let me live it down.
I crossed the room, feeling Misty’s gaze on my uneven stride, and yanked open the door, expecting nothing scarier than the heap of wet towels Misty was prone to leaving on the floor until they mildewed. Gross.
Instead, though, I almost walked face-first into a spirit, a big blurry spot leaning over the vanity, probably hard at work on another message.
An embarrassing and involuntary squeak escaped me before I could stop it, and I took a step back.
“Oh, hey.” The spot shifted and swirled in front of my eyes as it turned toward me, a distinctly female voice emerging from it. “I was wondering when you were going to show up.”
I couldn’t believe Alona. I pounded my fist against the steering wheel in frustration.
Though, really, shouldn’t you have known she was going to pull something like this?my logical side asked, deciding to put in a belated appearance. After all, Alona was not one to heroically suffer looking anything less than the best she thought she was capable of at any given moment. In fact, it was a little surprising it had taken her a month to get to this point.
And my reaction? You definitely could have handled that better.
Shut up,I told that censorious voice in my head.
That icy expression she’d worn before kissing me off had given me a sick feeling. It reminded me too much of the one she’d paraded around behind at school, back in her original body. That was Alona Dare—perfect, cool, untouchable. The irony was, of course, that it proved I was right in my long-running argument with her: it was more about attitude than actual appearance. But I didn’t feel I’d be helping myself by bringing that up today.
She looked good, and she knew it. For a second, I could see her stepping up and taking this life for her own, becoming the “Ally” she’d created in the space that used to be Lily’s.
True, she didn’t have her original body, and I was sure that that would have been her first choice if it had been remotely possible, which it wasn’t. But with what she’d done today—the clothes, her hair—it was clear she was growing more comfortable with being Ally, making that persona her own.
It was conceivable that one day she’d be comfortable enough with the new and improved Ally that she might not want to leave.
And if she didn’t want out anymore, she wouldn’t, in theory, need me any longer. There would be nothing keeping us together. That realization struck with cold, hard force, distracting me. A car horn blared, and I looked up to find myself crossing the yellow lines. Heart pounding, I jerked the wheel to keep the car on my side of the road.
I’d always considered, in the back of my mind, the possibility of losing her. To the light, to her own stubborn refusal to keep her energy level up by being positive. But the longer we’d been together, the less I liked to think about it, shoving it further and further down in my thoughts. I couldn’t imagine my life without her, in one form or another, and I didn’t want to think about her being taken away. I’d never thought about the fact she might walkaway.
I swallowed hard, fighting against the panicky feeling clawing at my chest. Yeah, in Lily’s body, she could hear and sort of see ghosts, which would make her life more complicated; but it wasn’t like I could help her with any of that. I’d needed herto help me.
Besides, she didn’t seem to need much assistance in that area. She was handling it better than I was.
No. I shook my head. I was being ridiculous. There was no way that she’d ever voluntarily stay in Lily’s body.
The only reason she’d even pulled this extreme-makeover routine was because she was unhappy with how she looked, finding Lily’s appearance inferior to her original body. Hadn’t we been fighting about that only yesterday?
So our problem was still the same as it had ever been: we had to find a way to get her out without hurting Lily.
I tried to feel as reassured by this line of thought as I had been over the last month, but it wasn’t working this time.
And then what?that pushy voice returned to ask.
Having started down this path of thinking, the conclusion was impossible to avoid. Assuming I could get Alona back as a spirit guide, things would go back to normal. We’d be helping ghosts between make-out sessions, and all would be great with the world…for a while.
But I was getting older and she wasn’t. I’d go to Richmond for classes and meet people who didn’t know her. If I wanted to go out and grab pizza with someone, either Alona couldn’t go or she’d have to tag along as a spectator and keep quiet, astate I couldn’t even imagine.
One day I’d be twenty-five and then thirty-five, forty-five.…She’d still be eighteen. At some point, that was going to get creepy, even beyond the living/dead issue we had going already. And maybe not now, or even in ten years, but I might want the possibility of a family. I couldn’t see any woman, even one cool enough to handle the fact that her husband talked to the dead on a regular basis, being okay with a spirit guide who looked like an eighteen-year-old cheerleader hanging around, especially if she knew there’d once been kissing. And, for that matter, I couldn’t see Alona being happy in that situation, either. I might not have been Chris Zebrowski, but sharing attention was not something Alona did well with anyone.